Guest blogger: The Power of Remembrance on a Teacher’s Pedagogy

Teachers
often want to be remembered. A
bittersweet aspect for many teachers lies in the loss of their class at the end
of each school year. There is no
surprise in the loss, and in fact, many teachers, aware of their fleeting time,
desire to live on in the memories of their students. What will students
remember about their class? What
learning will stay with them? What experiences will they recall year after
year, and most importantly perhaps, how will they remember their teacher? This question represents an important
barometer for teachers, but, especially for beginning teachers, it can have a
profound impact on their pedagogical development. How we want to be remembered has the power to
alter how we operate in the present and plan for the future. What do teacher
statements on how they want to be remembered tell us about how they see
teaching as an act of doing and a way of being? Could they be seen as an
indicator of their own pedagogical beliefs, or the normed beliefs they feel
obligated to espouse?

Teachers
are surrounded by discourses regarding what it means to be a teacher at every level
of their teacher development. They are
exposed to, explicitly and implicitly taught, and asked to exhibit (and be
evaluated on) a wide variety of abilities and dispositions that at times
overwhelm, contradict, and possibly re-prioritize the very qualities they are
being asked to demonstrate. This pedagogical tension is present in all
teachers, but especially in beginning teachers, as they attempt to find and develop
their teacher identity. How do we then acknowledge, embrace, and ultimately, better
support this pedagogical tension?

When
asked how they want to be remembered, teachers often express a desire to be seen
as a caring and intelligent person, capable of supporting both their students’
emotional and academic needs. Based on
the responses I got last summer from a group of amazing beginning teachers, it
is clear to me that thinking about how they will remembered is a daily act. One
teacher told me that she hoped her students would say that “She believed in me and saw my good,” and
another said he hoped they would say, “He
helped me learn new things and be excited about learning.” These statements reflected a hope teachers
had on how they wanted to be remembered in the future, but they were also
statements on what kind of teacher they wanted to be in the present.

I
think in the end, teachers want their work to have mattered, to have left a
mark. They, like one teacher wrote, “want [their] students to say…that they
will miss me.”